After month of hard work, we are both proud and excited to announce the beta version of Awesome Support v3.
If you don’t know Awesome Support, it’s our best and biggest plugin. It allows you to transform your site into a fully fledged helpdesk.
The plugin is currently for sale on CodeCanyon and the latest version is 2.1.2. It’s been sold over 1000+ times and has a rating of 4.16. The plugin has been out since May 2013 and has been widely improved since the release date. We have been over 32 versions, fixing bugs and adding lots of features.
A Bit of History
We first released Awesome Support after developing it for ourselves. We were looking for a support system that would allow us to provide quality support for our other products. Nothing seemed to work for us. Not because there isn’t any good solution, there is, it was just not adapted to us. We were way too small for Zendesk pricing and features.
We decided to release this plugin as a test. We were not sure people would actually use it. The result was completely unexpected. We sold a lot more than what we hoped for, and got fantastic feedback. This is not to say the plugin was flawless, we’ve been fixing (and still are) bugs here and there. But the concept and the way it handles support tickets was a huge success. In fact, we weren’t prepared for it.
Great Comments on CodeCanyon
Based on users features requests, we started to add more and more features to the plugin. Unfortunately it was not coded in a maintainable way, which lead to stability issues. We reached a critical moment around version 1.1.x and the plugin was very unstable. We managed to fix most of the broken things, but the codebase was still not easily maintainable.
Version 2 was an attempt to clean all this and make the code better. The features added to this version got appreciation, but the codebase was still not good enough.
In the meantime, we started thinking about the future of Awesome Support from a commercial point of view. We were not satisfied with how it worked (even though CodeCanyon was a great starting point) and were very interested in alternative economic models. The idea of giving something back to the WordPress community also had a big part in our decision.
The Rebirth of Awesome Support
Version 3 of Awesome Support can actually be considered as a new product. The plugin has been rewritten from the ground up and the features set is completely different. The entire plugin is completely different and here is what’s changed:
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- The plugin is now available for free and will be added to the WordPress plugins repository,
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- Features can be added with the purchase of premium addons,
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- We developed an API to enable developers to customize the plugin easily
These are the 3 major changes. In addition to that, we’ve worked hard on performance: the plugin is now way, way faster than what it used to be.
The plugin has been moved to a brand new repository on GitHub (it was living on BitBucket so far) and release the first beta version.
We are planning to have the beta open for about a month and we hope there will be a lot of feedback 
During this time we will finalize a few things and make sure everything works as expected. We do not plan to add new features before releasing a stable version, but that’s not a definite statement. Everything you need to know about the beta is explained here: http://getawesomesupport.com/awesome-support-3-beta/
If you want to try Awesome Support and help us make it even more awesome, please head over to the plugin’s new home at http://getawesomesupport.com. We will tell you everything you need to know and will publish regular updates.
Thanks for all of your support